The Central Operating Principles for Innovation at Retail

Innovation for innovation’s sake is generally a bad idea, one that leads to success based solely on serendipity and timing. In some industries (think technology), innovation IS the industry; you either innovate or you become irrelevant. In other industries, innovation only happens in extremes—as a life-saving initiative or as a transformational product that re-energizes a fading company.

Innovation at retail works best when an organization can focus time, energy, and resources on developing and implementing a successful strategy that will pique customer interest, increase traffic, and drive sales.

We believe that every successful strategy begins with a COP—a Central Operating Principle—that creates a foundation for a clear, concise plan that dictates what must be done and why.

Here are seven COPs for innovation at retail:

1. Intelligently Navigable Environments – Think of the store as a guide, an active map that provides traditional wayfinding as well as meaningful information for shoppers’ of-the-moment concerns and interests.
   
   
2. Retail as Stage Set - Barnes & Noble is the perfect example of how retail can be designed to serve as a category-specific “backdrop” that enhances the unique experience that shoppers seek in a particular type of store.
   
   
3. Communicating in the Customer’s Lexicon – Creating the ultimate shopper-centric retail space and experience requires three preliminary steps that most retailers fail to adequately utilize: 1) developing an extensive and intense understanding of the brand-defining shopper, 2) dimensionalizing that shopper’s literal and visual lexicon, and 3) mirroring back that iconic lexicon through store design, layout, and the shopping experience.
   
   
4. Store as Virtual Sales Associate – Instead of designing a store for one purpose, and hiring/training sales associates for support, design a retail environment that acts independently of the staff to provide the customer with everything they need to make a buying decision. While technology can address the “self-checkout,” it takes more to move the shopper into the store and up the decision ladder.
   
   
5. Store as Integrated Sales Associate Support System – Recognizing that finding, training, and keeping well-qualified sales associates is increasingly difficult and that competition for both personnel and customers is intensifying, a viable innovation at retail strategy platform is to turn the point of sale into a passive, ever-present, but exceptionally contributive integrated sales associate support system.
   
   
6. Retail as Brand Iconography – A perfect example of Retail as Brand Iconography can be found by examining the differences between Target and Kohl’s. Both retailers compete for the same customers, but only Target has managed to infuse its point of sale with an intensified brand iconography throughout its advertising, marketing, and in-store experience. Shoppers can readily identify (and identify with) Target’s brand sense both in store and out in the world. Kohl’s, on the other hand, presents one “face” in its advertising, and another—essentially a generic retail brand iconography—at the point of sale.
   
   
7. Sequence of Retail Moments – One of the more promising and least utilized strategies for innovation at retail involves rethinking the store environment and recasting it to reflect the moments of retail that begin with the “moment of invitation” and end with the “reinforcement moment.” This platform recognizes that, at specific, identifiable decision points, shoppers can be encouraged to move to the next retail moment and, ultimately, to the completion of a purchase.